1. Field of the Invention
The present invention relates to a method and a system for grading beef quality, and more particularly, to a method and a system for automatically grading beef quality by analyzing a digital image.
2. Description of the Related Art
In general, beef quality is graded just after butchering and the price of beef is determined depending on the grade. The grades of beef quality are determined on the basis of grades of meat quality and quantity and the grading is made with a specialized grader's naked eye.
However, the grading with the naked eye has a problem in that the objectivity of the grading result is not guaranteed because it is difficult to accumulate data quantized by grading items. There are problems in that time of the grading is very long and it is difficult to train specialized graders because of the importance in experience.
Techniques for automatically grading beef quality by image analysis have been studied to solve the above-mentioned problems and have attracted attentions more and more with improvement in digital imaging techniques. However, since lean and fat are mixed in a section of beef and are not clearly distinguished from each other, boundary lines of grading regions extracted in the related art are greatly different from boundary lines extracted by specialized graders.
Therefore, in the automatic grading, it is very important to invent a new method of extracting grading regions with boundary lines similar to the boundary lines extracted by the specialized graders.